Science

Astronomers propose that an ultra-dense clump of exotic dark matter could be masquerading as the powerful object thought to anchor our galaxy, explaining both the blistering speeds of stars near the center and the slower, graceful rotation of material far beyond. This dark matter structure would have a compact core that pulls on nearby stars like a black hole, surrounded by a broad halo shaping the galaxy’s outer motion.

Astronomers propose that an ultra-dense clump of exotic dark matter could be masquerading as the powerful object thought to anchor our galaxy, explaining both the blistering speeds of stars near the center and the slower, graceful rotation of material far beyond. This dark matter structure would have a compact core that pulls on nearby stars like a black hole, surrounded by a broad halo shaping the galaxy’s outer motion.

We’re back with the Caturday felids: three items and several more for lagniappe.

First, an 18-minute video from Meowtopia about how cats see humans. It’s designed to prove that cats aren’t just using us, but that we are “their secure base.”  It’s a mixture of true facts mixed with some dry humor, somewhat like a toned-down ZeFrank video. The them is cat psychology: “What are cats thinking?”

It turns out that we are actually “Super Providers” whose purpose is to provide food; in other words, we are vending machines made of meat.  But we also mean one thing to them: “Safety.”

The video invokes a lot of scientific research on cats, is full of interesting results, and is well worth watching.

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Click below to see an article from the Washington Post showing that “pet-friendly” hotels are actually biased against cats.  (The article is archived here.) What gives?

 

An excerpt; the article begins with cat staff checking into a “pet friendl” hotel in Amsterdam.

“Hotels will say they’re pet-friendly, but they really mean dogs,” said Erin Geldermans, who adopted “Liebs” in Colorado. “So we’ll show up with our cat, and they’re like, ‘Oh, sorry, cats aren’t allowed.’”

Cast into the night without a room, Geldermans and [their tabby cat Liebchen] landed on their feet, finding more inclusive accommodations at the Jan Luyken Amsterdam next door. The hotel didn’t even charge them a pet fee. However, the experience was a stark reminder that, for jet-setting cats, it’s a dog’s world.

Travelers who vacation with their feline companions say they have encountered an anti-cat bias around the world. They come across it in airports and on planes, at hotels and vacation rentals. The owners say they must often overcome hurdles to earn the same trust and acceptance granted to dogs.

“This is discrimination,” said Anna Karsten, a France-based travel blogger who has faced a double standard when traveling with her Ragdoll, Poofy. “It’s a higher risk, apparently, which, if you think about it, is outrageous. The cat is literally going to sleep, but the dog might destroy the entire room if it’s stressed.”

During check-in at a rental in the Dutch city of Leiden, Karsten had to provide references that Poofy was a model guest. Stung by a previous incident involving cat pee, the apartment’s owner said the family would have to keep Poofy in a “cage.”

After several minutes of negotiations, the two sides agreed to sequester the cat in the bathroom whenever the family was out. Karsten abided by the rule the first day but eventually left the door ajar. By the end of the week-long stay, the host had experienced a change of heart.

“She loved the cat,” Karsten said triumphantly.

REFERENCES??  The lesson is that if you travel with your cat, be sure that any “pet friendly” accommodations your reserve consider cats as adequate “pets.”  Actually, cats are not pets but owners, and we are their staff.

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We all know of Larry, the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office .  He was rescued from the Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, and has lived at 10 Downing Street for 15 years. Larry is now 19: technically an old cat, but still quite spry, running about outside the Prime Minister’s home and the object of many photographs. He’s gone through five Prime Ministers!

Here’s a 15-minute BBC News video showing seven times that Larry caused mischief.  He’s not a very good mouser; he’s said to have caught only 3 in his 15-year tenure.  Don’t miss Obama’s meeting Larry at 5:40.  There are many comments about Larry from Prime Ministers, journalists, and so on.

This too is an excellent video.  If you want more Larry, his Twitter feed is here.  Don’t miss the BBC journalist Helen Catt (that’s right!), who comments throughout.

Lagniappe: Larry turned 19 a few weeks ago.  Here is what he wants to tell us on his birthday, including how old he’d be in human years.

Extra lagniappe: Japanese road signs. Slow down for cats!

Still more lagniappe from the Facebook group Cats that Have Had Enough of Your Shit: A new and excellent Swedish law.  If we have any Swedish readers, please confirm this.

New simulations reveal that both H1N1 and COVID-19 spread across U.S. cities in a matter of weeks, often before officials realized what was happening. Major travel hubs helped drive rapid nationwide transmission, with air travel playing a bigger role than daily commuting. Unpredictable transmission patterns made real-time forecasting especially difficult. The study highlights why early detection systems are critical for slowing future pandemics.

Today we have urban wildlife, from Marcel van Oijen in Edinburgh.  His notes are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Urban wildlife in Scotland: Vertebrates

Marcel van Oijen

 

We live in Edinburgh South and our back garden borders a small woodland. The following pictures were all taken in the garden over a number of years, but I sorted them by month, from January to November.

Foxes (Vulpes vulpes) are among the first visitors to our garden each year. They have become very common in British cities. There are about 400,000 foxes in the U.K., and roughly one third are city-dwellers.

Magpies (Pica pica) come in droves to our garden. They are fascinating to watch but tend to frighten off the songbirds and steal their food:

Occasionally we see sparrowhawks (Accipiter nisus) plucking pigeons apart until what is left is small enough to fly away with. The magpies resent the sparrowhawks invading their territory, and gang up against them:

Carrion crows (Corvus corone) usually come in pairs; this one was an exception. The way it walked, paused, looked around, nodded its head, inspecting everything – it all suggested confidence and cleverness:

We do not often see Great Spotted Woodpeckers (Dendrocopos major), but regularly hear them pecking away when walking in the woodland behind the garden:

The mammals we see the most are our American friends, the Grey Squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis). They tend to chase ach other away, but these two were friendly, maybe young siblings:

We are always surprised to see amphibians because there is not much open water in our neighbourhood. This summer visitor is a Common Frog (Rana temporaria):

Wood mice (Apodemus sylvaticus) are almost as acrobatic as the squirrels, and we see them climbing up the stems of plants and jumping onto the birdfeeders:

We don’t see hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus) often enough – we would like them to eat more of the slugs that invade our house from the garden:

This is the more common behaviour of the Grey Squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis): entering supposedly squirrel-proof birdfeeders and being nasty to each other:

We often see pheasants (Phasianus colchicus) around the golf course one kilometer away, but last November was the first time one came to see us:

Strange as it may seem, the prospects of finding advanced high-tech aliens somewhere in the cosmos will likely depend on finding exoplanets that like our own earth harbor large amounts of accessible energy-dense coal.

An international team of researchers have published two papers that reveal a new model for how the magnetic field of the Milky Way evolved.

Recently published data from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) of the galaxy Messier 87 facilitate new insights into the direct environment of the central supermassive black hole. Measured differences in the radio light on different spatial scales can be explained by the presence of an as of yet undetected jet at frequencies of 230 Gigahertz at spatial scales comparable to the size of the black hole. The most likely location of the jet base is determined through detailed modeling.

Isn’t the FLRW metric way generic? It lays out the basic assumptions and tells us how the universe should behave, but it doesn’t say WHAT the universe is made of.

The flow of ice at Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica has sped up dramatically due to the disintegration of the ice shelf in front of it, and this could lead to faster sea level rise

The old Groundhog Day trope is this, “As the tradition goes, if the groundhog sees his shadow, we will have six more weeks of winter. If he doesn’t, an early spring is coming.”  The holiday is celebrated on February 2, and over the years the tradition has come to center on Punxsutawney Phil, a groundhog who lives in the eponymous Pennsylvania town.

Every year on February 2, a group of top-hatted men called the “Inner Circle” haul the hapless rodent out of his hibernation, slap him down on a lectern like a pancake, tap him with a cane, and then wait a bit. Then they lift the groundhog into the air and proclaim, via a poem, whether or not he saw his shadow. Here’s this year’s prediction: Phil did see his shadow (so they surmised) so we’re in for a long winter:

Of course the exercise is ludicrous, and Phil’s record of predictions is abysmal: about a 35%-40% accuracy.  But I can prove from first principles that this exercise is futile from the get-go.

Here:

To determine if the groundhog sees his shadow there must be

1.)  The possibility of a shadow (i.e., the sun must be shining), and

2.) If there is a shadow, the groundhog must have the ability to see it, and we have to know if he did or did not.

But if there is no shadow, as when the weather is overcast like this year, then the groundhog has nothing to see or not see, so he clearly cannot see his shadow whether or not he looks.  Thus, if the weather is overcast (as it was this year), you don’t need a damn groundhog: there will be an early spring. (As you see above, he is said to have seen his shadow! Oy!)

If there IS a shadow, then you have to determine whether the groundhog saw it.  I doubt that we’re able to do this, as Punxsutawney Phil is not trained to indicate whether or not he saw his own shadow. Thus if it’s sunny, the prediction becomes indeterminate.

Therefore there is only one possible predictive outcome, and that depends solely on whether the weather is sunny or not. The sole prediction is this (here it comes): no shadows possible, therefore an early Spring. That is, of course, bogus as well.

You could diagram this with a decision tree, but I think my logic here is impeccable given our inability to detect qualia in groundhogs. And this indicates why Phil’s bogus “predictions”, based on what the top-hatted men say, have been so inaccurate.

Science funding cuts in the UK are expected to be a "devastasting blow" for physics research, affecting international projects such as particle detection experiments at CERN

Humans have the ability to do “secondary representations”: that is, to pretend that one object or action is actually different from a real one. This can also be called “pretense”. Examples are children’s “tea parties” in which they use empty pots and toy cups, pretending to drink from the empty cups while knowing they are empty. Then they can pour pretend tea into one of two cups, and when asked to drink will drink from the “pretend full” cup. Or they can have sword fights with sticks, pretending that the sticks are real weapons while knowing they are not.

Secondary representations of states that are only imagined start early (some experiments suggest at 15 months), and the ability to imagine things that haven’t happened, or aren’t real, surely underlie much of human behavior involving planning for the future or imagining what someone might be thinking.  The authors of a new paper in Science (see below) argue that no such abilities to “pretend” or have secondary representations are known from any species save humans. (I am not sure about this. As I recall some birds caching food are known to unhide it and re-cache it elsewhere if they see other birds looking on: something that seems like an ability represent another bird’s state of mind.)

And there is anecdotal evidence that chimps can do this.  For example, female chimps have been seen to hold and carry sticks as if they were their babies; this involves imagining that the stick is a real baby (that only females do this suggests sexually differentiated behavior).  Or if chimps have played with blocks, sometimes they’ve been observed to drag around imaginary strings of blocks.  This and other data suggest that some primates can have imaginative representations, but the existing data, say Bastos et al., don’t rule out other explanations.

They thus did three experiments on a single, human-acclimated male bonobo at a facility in Iowa. The bonobo, named Kanzi, was 43 years old and died the year after the experiment (no, he didn’t pretend to be dead!). Kanzi has his own Wikipedia page, which notes his abilities:

Kanzi is well known for his noteworthy cognitive abilities. He had a very well-documented linguistic understanding of the human language. He is believed to be the first non-human great ape to understand and comprehend spoken English. In addition, he was also heavily documented for his understanding and usage of symbols to communicate, usually through lexigrams and partial ASL. The vast amount of information that researchers gathered from Kanzi created a significant impact for the fields of linguistics and cognitive science. Kanzi’s behavior and abilities have been the topic of research published in scientific journals, as well as reports in popular media. He died in 2025, in Atlanta, Georgia.

Click below to go to the paper (pdf here), or you can read a summary of the study in the NYT, written by Alexa Robles-Gil, here (archived here)

Three experiments were involved, but the second was really a control for the first.

First, Kanzi was prepared for the pretense test by letting him learn about a real object: fruit juice that could be poured into glasses from a pitcher. In 18 trials, real juice was poured into one of two cups from a pitcher. Kanzi, who had been trained to point at what he wanted to have, was then asked, “Where’s  the juice?” He was successful in all trials.

Then the pretense experiment began. The same pouring was done, but from an empty pitcher into both of two empty cups.  Then one of the pretend-filled cups was poured back into the pitcher, so it would be pretend-empty while the other was pretend-full. Again, Kanzi was asked “Where’s the juice?”  In 50 trials, involving no reinforcement of any kind for making the correct choice, Kanzi chose the pretend-full cup 34 times and the pretend-empty cup 16 times, a highly significant deviation from an expectation of 50:50 under the null hypothesis. This showed that Kanzi could track where pretend juice was.

The second experiment used a cup of real juice next to an empty cup, and the empty cup was pretend-filled from an empty pitcher. Then Kanzi was asked, “Which one do you want?” Kanzi wanted the real juice in 14 out of 18 trials, again, a significant deviation from 50:50 under the null hypothesis. This showed that Kanzi didn’t simply believe that there was real juice in the empty cups in the first experiment, for he was able to distinguish real juice from pretend-poured juice.

The third experiment was like the second, except involving grapes. First, Kanzi was “trained to indicate the location of a real grape in one of two transparent jars after observing the experimenter sample a grape from a plastic container and place it into one of the jars and perform a control action on the other jar.” When asked to choose one jar to get the grape, he was successful in every one of 18 trials.

Then Kanzi was given pretend grapes to choose. From the paper;

In probe trials, the experimenter pretended to sample a grape from an empty container, then placed it inside one of the two jars, before repeating the same action on the other side. Then, one of the jars was pretend-emptied, and Kanzi was asked, “where’s the grape?” Kanzi succeeded at this conceptual replication even more quickly than in the first experiment. He correctly indicated the location of the remaining pretend grape above chance, in 31 out of 45 unreinforced probe trials

Again, Kanzi was highly successful at the juice and grape trials, able to recognize a pretend action of pouring and emptying juice, and determining which of two jars containing pretend-grapes had had the grape removed. In other words, he was playing tea party, and highly successfully.

This one chimp, then, was able to conceptualize pretend actions as real ones.

There are a number of possibilities not involving secondary representation that the authors say could be happening here. For example, apes like Kanzi who have been trained to recognize symbols to represent objects (as he was), might be better at communicating their wishes than are wild apes. Or symbol training could actually create the ability to do secondary representation. It’s hard to rule out these possibilities since to do such experiments an ape has to be “enculturated” by interaction with humans, and Kanzi was surely highly enculturated.

But if the authors are right that these experiments show that apes can have secondary representation, playing along with “pretense”, that opens up a world of possibilities of thinking about the cognitive abilities of apes (and other animals). The authors dwell on this at the end:

Secondary representations underlie many other complex cognitive capacities, such as imagining future possibilities (20) and mental state attribution (13). Our results may therefore help to interpret other bodies of data that have been hampered by an apparent logical problem (32). Finding that a bonobo can generate secondary representations in pretense contexts increases the likelihood that these representations are available for other cognitive functions. This finding reinforces growing evidence that apes track decoupled mental states, such as beliefs, rather than simply reading behavior (25, 28, 31). It also increases the likelihood that secondary representations could subserve future-oriented behavior (24, 35, 50–53), whose underlying representations have not yet been established.

In conclusion, our findings suggest that some nonhuman animals can generate secondary representations that are decoupled from reality, and that this capacity was likely within the cognitive potential of our last common ancestor with other apes, which lived 6 to 9 million years ago.

It is no surprise that our closest relative (along with chimps) could do this. As Darwin posited in 1871, our own behaviors and mental states evolved from those present in our common ancestors.

Kanzi died suddenly the year after the experiment, simply collapsing. He apparently suffered a heart attack, as he had a history of heart issues and had previously been obese. You can read about his other training in representing objects with keyboard symbols at the Wikipedia site.

From Wikipedia, here’s Kanzi in 2006 (he died in 2025):

William H. Calvin, PhD, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Inspired by the shape-shifting skin of octopuses, Penn State researchers developed a smart hydrogel that can change appearance, texture, and shape on command. The material is programmed using a special printing technique that embeds digital instructions directly into the skin. Images and information can remain invisible until triggered by heat, liquids, or stretching.

Inspired by the shape-shifting skin of octopuses, Penn State researchers developed a smart hydrogel that can change appearance, texture, and shape on command. The material is programmed using a special printing technique that embeds digital instructions directly into the skin. Images and information can remain invisible until triggered by heat, liquids, or stretching.

When we exercise more, our bodies may compensate by using less energy for other things – especially if we eat less too

Today we have some flower photos from reader MichaelC.  His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Sri Lanka Flora!

 

Recently I sent WEIT some photos from the Dambulla cave temples in Sri Lanka. My wife and I took a “pre-honeymoon” there (we took our honeymoon before the wedding; we’re olde so rules don’t apply to us!) and I have a large number of photos of Sri Lankan flora.  [Today we have the flora.]

I hope some of the ones I’ve selected are new to readers. I have tried to identify them, some I’m sure of, others not so much, and some I don’t know at all. The countryside in Sri Lanka is bursting with color; there are flowers everywhere. And birdsong! If you don’t like singing birds, Sri Lankan is not a place for you. Most of the flowers are probably familiar to people – I’ve seen many myself. These were mostly taken at the Royal Botanical Gardens or on the estate of the Dilmah Tea Plantation.

A Vanda orchid, possibly Vanda suksamran?

Black Bat flower (Tacca chantrieri). I know some Goth friends of my son who I bet would like this plant!:

Some type of rose. St. Nicholas’ Damask, maybe?:

Scarlet Sage (Salvia splendens):

Bachelor’s buttons (Centratherum punctatum or Centratherum intermedium?):

The familiar Hanging Lobster Claw (Heliconia rostrata):

There were a large variety of Angels trumpets (Brugmansia spp.) in parks, gardens, and jungles all over Sri Lanka. Here are a few;

Some kind of orchid (my notes say it’s a Dendrobium orchid):

Egyptian Starcluster (Pentas lanceolata):

Star of Bethlehem (Hippobroma longiflora):

Quantum computers struggle because their qubits are incredibly easy to disrupt, especially during calculations. A new experiment shows how to perform quantum operations while continuously fixing errors, rather than pausing protection to compute. The team used a method called lattice surgery to split a protected qubit into two entangled ones without losing control. This breakthrough moves quantum machines closer to scaling up into something truly powerful.

Quantum computers struggle because their qubits are incredibly easy to disrupt, especially during calculations. A new experiment shows how to perform quantum operations while continuously fixing errors, rather than pausing protection to compute. The team used a method called lattice surgery to split a protected qubit into two entangled ones without losing control. This breakthrough moves quantum machines closer to scaling up into something truly powerful.

Five volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io erupted simultaneously, spewing a mind-boggling amount of lava onto the surface and giving us clues to what may lie underneath